ABSTRACT
When motivated policymakers in developing countries set out to achieve a capitalist transition they need knowledge of the capitalist institutions that can be emulated, and knowledge of sequences and dynamics of institutional change. How is such knowledge created and how is it made available in the world? Can leaders and citizens in the developing countries be persuaded to take the capitalist path? What resistance will be encountered? What cognitive capacities are required? This chapter applies positive ideas about the agencies of change to a critique of approaches that emphasize interest-group, cultural, or cognitive constraints on reform. The objective is to restore two interlinked cognitive and volitional variables – ideology and rationality – to the centre of the analysis of capitalism and capitalist transition. The major political and economic systems of the world in the past century were shaped, for better or worse, by the ideas of intellectuals who knew the power of ideology and realized the potential of rationality. Hayek, for one, understood that ‘ideology may well be something whose widespread acceptance is the indispensable condition for most of the particular things we strive for’. Ideology is ‘the indispensable precondition of any rational policy, but also the chief contribution that science can make to the solution of the problems of practical policy’ (Hayek 1982: vol. 1, 58, 65). I will argue that ideology must be cognitive, rational, and scientific in order to motivate capitalist policy. Good policy, also, needs to be rationally formulated and implemented. Since these requirements of the transition to capitalism assume a preexisting level of knowledge of capitalism, it will be important also to take a hard look at how the social sciences interpret capitalism. Some summary definitions of the basic terms – ideology and rationality on one hand, and interest and culture on the other – will serve to introduce the argument. The Oxford English Reference Dictionary explains ‘ideology’ simply as ‘the system of ideas at the basis of an economic or political theory’. To this could be added that ideology aims to influence the attitudes and beliefs of a population with the intention of maintaining or changing the political or economic orientation of the social system. Ideology communicates belief in the relative legitimacy, justice, or effectiveness of a theoretical or empirical system of means to ends, such as could be applied to state policy. My understanding of
‘ideology’ is close to Mannheim’s definition of utopia, although Mannheim (1960: 184) understood utopianism as the opposite of ideology: ‘Ideas which later turned out to have been only distorted representations of a past or potential social order were ideological, while those which were adequately realized in the succeeding social order were relative utopias’. I understand ideologies to be cognitive rationalizations of concrete reality for ideal purposes. In contrast, Elster (1983: 141) describes ideology as ‘a set of beliefs or values that can be explained through the position or (non-cognitive) interest of some social group’. It is easy to agree that ideology is a biased belief, a disposition towards one opinion or interest rather than another. Yet ideology can be a true expression of socialscience data, founded on fact and logic. It can also be detached from the values or interests of the group or the individual. As a cognitive innovation rational ideology may be hostile to capitalism, or a carrier for the stock of knowledge favouring capitalist transition. ‘Rationality’ as it relates to policy is the effort to calculate optimum means to the end. One thinks rationally by applying a scientific style of reasoning to the decision. Weber said that ‘rational technique’ is ‘a choice of means which is consciously and systematically oriented to the experience and reflection of the actor, which consists, at the highest level of rationality, in scientific knowledge’ (Weber 1978: 65). Rationalism aims for precision in the estimation of the outcomes of an action, in order, as far as is reasonably possible, to control experience.
